Seven Lead Generation Strategies

Successful lead generation will change your life. Increasing qualified leads makes it easier to sell and will improve your profitability. In fact, a good lead generation strategy can attract so many customers to you that the days of cold calling and expensive mailing will be over for you.

This report is designed to give you seven different lead generation strategies that can increase your business and give you more qualified leads to work with. Each of these strategies can increase leads, improve the quality of leads and grow a business. By combining these lead generation strategies you can expect results that steadily get better and make you more money.

This report is not complete lead generation training. Where possible, I have added links where you can find more information or check out Web tools that improve lead generation and make it easier to successfully attract leads.

The following lead generation strategies are common and proven methods for producing more and better leads.

1. Free Report or Video

One of the most critical elements of online lead generation is offering something that attracts more leads and increases the "call to action" response. The "Call to Action" is the offer you make that gets a visitor to your website to take action. This could be to buy something. However, what marketers have found is that if you offer a free report or video of high value to your ideal leads, you can offer it in exchange for the visitor's email address and this will then mean you can follow up regularly and build your relationship over time.

This may seem like a lot of work, but a low cost auto responder, such as aWeber, can build your relationship on autopilot and when people do call you, they will feel like they know you already if you have sent out a series of good quality, regular emails.

If you have questions about how this is done, watch the aWeber training videos. They do a great job of walking you through this.

2. Inbound Lead Generation with Wordpress

Search Engine Optimization is when you rank for search terms in search engines and attract leads that are searching on your topic. These leads are usually of VERY high value because they are searching on your topic and probably have a need for your services, either immediately or in the near future.

Unfortunately, Search Engine Optimization can be time intensive and difficult for people that have not been working with it for a while. But fortunately for you, I am going to give you a huge short cut.

Free, opensource Wordpress blogging with some minor modifications can attract leads to you from search engines without you needing to be a search expert. You can use a tool like Buzzoodle Lead Generation to set a site like this up quickly. Or you can just give it a try on Bluehost Hosting and write regularly and you should still get good results.

The key to successful lead generation is to make sure you have that free call to action very prominent on the blog as well as your phone number on every page if you want calls. This will attract high quality leads to you. This strategy does usually take 2-3 months to begin producing results and you will need to write articles regularly.

3. Twitter Lead Generation

Twitter is not the best option to generate leads anymore. That is, unless you can automate the creation of high quality, targeted tweets and also build your list on autopilot. I use a tool called Tweet Adder to do just that.

This tool could be used for spam, but when you are careful, you can create high value and great traffic by setting up multiple twitter accounts, targeting your niche and letting them run on autopilot.

I find that this tool can produce very steady daily traffic to my sites.

Tricks to success are:

Do not be too aggressive - start slow and then pick up the pace as your account grows.

Only have links in 50% or less of your posts

Follow people that are using terms you know might be used by a qualified lead.

Use this tool and these tips and you can put Twitter to work generating leads for you.

4. FaceBook Lead Generation

FaceBook is not necessarily seen as a place to do business. However, it is a place where people interact with other people and you cannot overlook the fact that people are what leads are made out of.

Some types of products and services are easier to promote and develop leads for in FaceBook that others. However, I have seen non profit donations, Fortune 1000 leads and more come though connections on FaceBook, so ignoring it is not an option anymore.

The trick is to build a community, which means you have to work daily in FaceBook and get people to like your Fan Pages. Once you build up a decent following, your promotions will roll out through their wall to all their friends and family as well as to them. This can produce a massive flow of traffic and some good quality leads.

Of course, promoting your free video or free report is going to get the FaceBook visitor to join your email and then you can promote to them more frequently and directly with email.

5. LinkedIn Lead Generation

LinkedIn is a professional network where the members typically have a higher net worth and are more active in business and professional services. They are also much more likely to be college educated than FaceBook members.

So if this audience fits the kind of leads you want to attract, LinkedIn is an important part of your lead generation strategy.

The trick to get the most out of LinkedIn for lead generation is to have a great profile and to participate. You can ask and answer questions in the Q&A area, recommend people you know and participate in groups.

If you have a high value report or video, you can email group managers and ask them to send an email about your free product to their list. This can generate a large influx of targeted leads that join your list and you can continue to build the relationship and sell to them over time with your auto responder.

6. Lead Generation with Webinars

Webinars are shown to produce a large number of leads and buyers when done well. The reason is that they produce high engagement and they are going to attract good quality leads because even though the webinar is free, the hour long commitment is significant to most people and they will only attend if the topic is of interest to them.

You can use many different tools to do webinars. One of the most common is GoToWebinar. Others include Zoho and AnyMeeting, which you may want to look at.

A clever approach to Webinars has been the advent of mock webinars that work much like auto responders but do webinars. Presentation Domination is one system that you may want to look at for this kind of system, which can give you a bigger bang for your effort.

One key is to look at the formula of people doing webinars. You want to start out establishing credibility and connecting with your audience. Then you want to give some high quality information. Finally you want to clearly and firmly make your offer.

7. JV Lead Generation

Finally, Joint Ventures (JV) are great for lead generation when you can get the right people lined up. Many online marketers exclusively use JV and affiliate relationships to drive huge lead generation and sales in a short time.

The key to this strategy working is that you need to have something to offer JV partners. Either you are going to pay them for the leads and sales or you are going to trade them with a similar effort of promoting them. This is going to mean that you need to have a significant sized email list if you are thinking about doing a trade.

Another way to possibly partner is to exchange bonuses or even refer people to a JV page after they have signed up for your list, and ask the JV partner to do the same.

Bonus: Membership Site Lead Generation

One successful lead generation technique I have used is to create a free membership site that is only for select people. For example, I have set up free membership sites using Wishlist Member and then used it as a bonus, as a way to train JV partners, as a way to get people interested in the topic and also sometimes as a paid membership site.

This is included as a bonus to this article but it should be noted that setting up a membership site does take time and it helps if you have some experience with technology.

* I do get compensated for some, but not all of these linked products when visitors buy.